Porting Doom to various devices has become an art over the years. From calculators to printers, the first level of “Knee Deep in the Dead” tends to show up in a lot of places. This is the first time, at least that I’m aware of, that a modder has figured out how to actually play Doom inside of Minecraft itself.
The mod works via VirtualBox (as-in, the software) and an associated Minecraft mod. Essentially, the mod allows you to order a computer from a satellite that passes overhead 5x per day. Once you’ve ordered it, you can configure the box for the type of machine you want to virtually emulate, then install an emulated operating system. You can probably guess where this is going:
I played DOOM in Minecraft with VMComputers mod. from Minecraft
While running Doom in Minecraft via VirtualBox is new, it turns out that running Doom inside of other applications isn’t as novel as I thought it was. It’s actually possible to run Doom inside of GZDoom already, thanks to a tool called Action Code Script, which raises a question of its own: Is it possible to run GZDoom in Minecraft, and then to run Doom inside of GZDoom?
Because if you did, you’d be running Doom inside of Doom, inside of a virtual machine, inside of Minecraft, which itself is just one application running on a PC. When I was a kid, one of the things we did for fun was call people who had threeway calling, then get them to call someone, and so on. We once built up a long enough chain of people (reports varied on how many) that we were all simultaneously disconnected and the phone system fired off an “all circuits are busy” when we tried to call each other back.
Running Doom inside of Doom inside of Minecraft reminds me of something similar. It’s also an amusing way to waste modern CPU performance by finding the point at which a computer can no longer effectively play Doom because the weight of every other simulation/game running behind Doom has left the machine inoperable.
We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Take your fun where you can find it.
PCGamer has a pretty great list of other “computers” you can play Doom on. Doom has also been ported to the Commodore 64, an ATM, and (my personal favorite), a piano. The ultimate trick would be if playing the music from “Knee Deep in the Dead” on the piano also successfully maneuvered Doomguy through the level and let him exit successfully.
Feature image by VMComputers, Minecraft mod
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